If you ever wanted to get an application that could simply suppress all the adverts on the right-hand side of your Gmail’s message window, aggregate all social networking accounts of the people you contact through Gmail and display it when required, I advise you to try Rapportive.

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Rapportive is a small plug-in for Gmail that lets you view information about your Gmail contacts at glance. Using the application, one can easily check where his contacts are based, what do they do, etc. Didn’t get it? Well, consider a case where someone sends you a mail with some basic information about him/her and links to his/her profiles on many social media sites.

Depending you find it useful or worrisome, you could easily establish a rapport with the person by mentioning your interests and connect him/her through social networking accounts, if necessary. In short, you could research a person’s profile before getting to know him/her in person.

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Let’s proceed and see how to use Rapportive.

How to use Rapportive

Go to the developer’s website and click on ‘Add Rapportive to Gmail’ button.

Next, log into your Gmail account and open a message. You should see ‘Rapportive’ menu there. Click on the drop-down menu to log into Rapportive.

Then, choose the ‘Connect your Social Networks’ option. The option lets you connect your social network to Rapportive which then offers you many advanced features, richer contact profiles and faster search results.

Once done, you can open any email and view more information about your contact by clicking on any of his/her social networking account link on the right side of the message. All the information gets automatically pulled from available online profile.

If you would like to add more features to Rapportive, just click on drop-down arrow again and choose ‘Add Rapplets’ option. To check out the complete list of rapplets to add to your side bar, visit here.

Finally, if you would like to close Rapportive without signing out from Gmail, simply click on the Rapportive link and choose ‘Log out’ option, that’s it!

To download and use Rapportive with Gmail, visit the HomePage. Get everything about your contacts right inside your inbox!